Book excerpt: This practical guide to facilitating planning meetings will enable you to effectively jump-start your projects and lead to success. Rigorous planning is vital to your project execution and success. Projects are often multifunctional, requiring input from various stakeholders. Project planning often tends to be done piecemeal or not at all, often leading to missing and/or incomplete information and correspondingly poor results. This book will show you how to do it right. How to Facilitate Productive Project Planning Meetings is a guide to help you plan your projects by showing you how to effectively facilitate productive face-to-face kickoff sessions (both in person and virtual) and ongoing planning meetings. Effective planning meetings will help you not only develop key artifacts but also provide continuous team building. You’ll also learn about the impacts of culture (organizational and global) on team dynamics and discover methods to ameliorate these impacts. A case study of building a sustainable house will help you understand the concepts and grasp the terminology. The book will also feature dozens of illustrative stories (from the authors as well as other practicing project managers) that will illustrate meeting techniques that went well (or not so well). Numerous templates, sample schedules, and checklists round out the value of this book in helping you facilitate effective meetings.